Mollie pondered a little, and then sighed again: "It will be rather hard. He doesn't want anything frightfully except football, and there isn't any just now. Perhaps we could make him want to come; couldn't Hugh invent some way? It was only one chance in a hundred—in a thousand, perhaps, that made me talk to your photograph. Let us ask Hugh."
"We can ask," Prudence agreed, "but his head is going to be packed full of telephone now, and he won't think or speak of anything else for days. That's the way he is; we get rather tired of it sometimes, especially when we have to help. Grizzel collected four hundred corks for his raft. She grubbed in the ashpit, and among the empty beer-bottles—" Prudence sighed in her turn.
The two girls met Hugh at the white gate on his return from school, and
Mollie seized the first opportunity to make her request.
"I don't know," Hugh answered thoughtfully; "there ought to be a way. I believe there is a way somewhere to do everything, if you can only find it. It's mostly a question of looking long enough. And a thing is always in the last place you look for it—naturally. I am going to make a telephone; if I could make one long enough—" he paused.
They were strolling up the wide, cypress-bordered path as they talked, and Mollie's wandering gaze fell upon a low mound at the foot of one of the cypress trees.
"What's that?" she asked, coming to a standstill. "It looks like a cat's grave."
It was a grave sure enough, and crowned with a bunch of pansies. A small headstone had been made from the lid of an old soapbox, on which was printed the following inscription:
HERE LITH THE LONGEST DANDY LION CHANE IN THE WURLD
"It's Grizzel," said Prudence; "why on earth has she gone and buried her beautiful chain?"
Grizzel joined the group and answered for herself: